Double wide flatbed trucks navigated the bridges into Manhattan to transport five monumental works by Frank Stella to Jeffrey Deitch’s SoHo gallery.

They are among the most ambitious and most radical works being made by any artist today. They extend Stella’s forms even further into three dimensions. The works are not painted sculptures or relief paintings. They completely fuse painting and sculpture in a way that has never been achieved before. The sculptures have never been shown in New York City.

Frank Stella said that one of the objectives of his recent artistic approach has been to “build a painting rather than painting a painting.” The new work is a realization of this ambition. Stella combines traditional artists’ techniques with high technology to create his new work. His monumental sculptures begin with computer models that are transformed into a series of small sculptural maquettes through 3-D printing. The artist refines these models in the studio and then sends them to fabricators in the Netherlands and Belgium where they are engineered and constructed using technology derived from shipbuilding. The sections are then shipped to Stella’s studio in the Hudson Valley where they are refined and painted with automotive paint.

The exhibition features works from two series, Scarlatti Sonata Kirkpatrick from 2014, and Atlantic Salmon Rivers from 2021-23. The Scarlatti Sonata Kirkpatrick sculptures are created with high density foam covered in fiberglass. The Grand Cascapedia, inspired by the Canadian river known for salmon fishing, is made from aluminum. As in all of Stella’s work, the forms embody their materials. The materials inspire the forms.

Stella’s work of the 1980s were characterized by its extension of two-dimensional painting into his version of baroque space. These new works extend beyond baroque space into outer space. The forms seem to float in anti-gravity. They ascend, transcending their weight. They do not have front or a back, existing in the round.

Frank Stella has expanded the art discourse for more that six decades. His new work continues to advance art into a place where it has never been before.

Install photos by Genevieve Hanson.
©2024 Frank Stella / Artists Rights Society (ARS)

Opening reception: Saturday, September 7, 6-8PM

Amanda Ba, born in Ohio from first generation Chinese American parents, has long been influenced by diasporic memories and her family heritage. In her latest works, Ba observes China from a different perspective, seeking to capture the country’s cultural consciousness and interrogate its formation. Developing Desire features new paintings, a three-channel video and her first foray into installation.

While working on the exhibition, Ba traveled to Hefei in Anhui Province, the city where she spent the first five years of her life and still maintains family connections. The raw footage she filmed while observing the city, the paradoxes of its booming real estate developments and its residents’ daily lives, comprises More Future Triptych (2024). This three-channel video, made in collaboration with Ba’s partner Justine Cheng, combines real and staged everyday scenes of public life to explore China’s history, obsessions and desires as they manifest on the surface of the country’s reality. “China’s fantasy of the world. The World’s fantasy of China,” says the voiceover, “What does it mean to desire the world? Can what is given be refused?”

Echoing the perennial and ever growing construction sites captured in the video, a billboard composed of sixteen paintings will rise in the main gallery space. Mimicking a post-internet heart-shaped collage filter, this mosaic of portraits seem to speak of the personal dreams and professional hopes of the young generation. The resulting effect mixes elements of socialist realism, pop art
and advertising. The back of the billboard features wheatpasted drawings that appropriate the Dazibao handwritten posters of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. For these calligraphic drawings, Ba worked collaboratively with other contributors in a manner that is similar to graffiti writing, embracing the democratic nature of public text.

On the gallery’s walls, Ba’s new paintings feature goddess-like, oversized nude figures, their sensuous, otherworldly flesh often appearing against or inhabiting Chinese metropolitan landscapes: the Huangpu river in central Shanghai, the city’s iconic highway interchanges, the ruins of redeveloped office and apartment complexes. These works seem to expose psychosexual fantasies, drawing unexpected connections between ideas of desire, libido, capital, nationalism, and democracy. Rubble is another recurring motif in Ba’s new paintings, appearing as the signifier for the impulses that propel the repeated acts of construction, destruction and reconstruction to which the exhibition bears witness.

Amanda Ba was born in 1998 in Columbus, Ohio, and currently lives and works in New York City. She studied Visual Arts and Art History at Columbia University in New York and Slade School of Fine Art in London. Her work was included in Wonder Women, curated by Kathy Huang at Jeffrey Deitch in New York and Los Angeles, and 100 Years, an exhibition organized by Jeffrey Deitch and Gagosian in Miami’s Design District, both in 2022. Developing Desire is Ba’s first solo show in New York.

Image: Amanda Ba, Rubble Titan (2024). Photo by Genevieve Hanson.

Watch the full interview between artist Mr. Wash and independent curator Zoe Lukov here.

Tour begins at 3PM

Jeffrey Deitch invites you to an exhibition tour of At the Edge of the Sun with participating artists Michael Alvarez, rafa esparza, Jaime Muñoz and Shizu Saldamando. The tour will be moderated by independent curator Diana Nawi.

For more information on the exhibition please visit this link.

Please join us for a conversation between artist Austin Lee and professor and author Jacob Gaboury to discuss the past, present and future of digital images.

The conversation will take place within the exhibition on Saturday, September 7 at 4 pm.

No RSVP is required.

About Austin Lee –

Austin Lee (b. 1983) is an artist based in New York. Lee’s paintings often combine digital technologies with traditional media. Lee was born in Las Vegas, and raised in Philadelphia. He received an MFA in Painting from Yale School of Art in 2013 and a BFA in Painting from Tyler School of Art in 2006. While a student in Philadelphia, Lee’s studio doubled as a gallery space where he organized group and solo exhibitions to promote his artistic community. In recent years, he has presented several international exhibitions in Asia, Europe and the United States. Lee has collaborated with Jeffrey Deitch on his solo exhibitions Like It Is in 2022 and Feels Good in New York in 2019, a curated solo presentation at The Armory Show and Good Pictures, a group show with over forty contemporary artists, both in 2020. He has had two major museum exhibitions in Asia, the first at M WOODS Museum in Beijing in 2022 and the second at the Lotte Museum of Art in Seoul in 2023.

About Jacob Gaboury –

Jacob Gaboury is an Associate Professor of Film & Media at the University of California, Berkeley specializing in the seventy year history of digital images and their impact on our contemporary visual culture. His first book is Image Objects: An Archaeology of Computer Graphics (MIT Press 2021), and it traces a material history of early computer graphics through a set of five objects that structure the production and circulation of all digital images today.

In the forty years since Wild Style was released, this small budget independent movie has stood as a testament to a scene, a subculture and a city that seems almost unimaginable today. Amidst a flurry of change, the nascence of a renaissance, a happenstance of abandonment and neglect colliding with the exuberantly wayward energies of invention and hope, Wild Style captured something all too illusive, fleeting and ephemeral and set it down as an indelible record, like lightning in a bottle or a dream journal, truth and witness to a crazy fantasy so fantastic we might otherwise imagine it an urban myth. What started as a game of make-believe ended up changing reality for a generation of participants caught up in its imaginary, as well as for subsequent generations who have chased its impossible liberties ever since. Wild Style 40 is a celebration in the form of an exhibition, a family and friends reunion of the visual artists who defined an era and inspired a movement.

Charlie Ahearn, who wrote and directed Wild Style, once told me he was trying to make it like an art movie for teenagers, a song and dance family musical. For all the hardboiled noire gangster pimp and pusher parables that have come to define urban celluloid, this paean to joy would be the infectious charm that makes this film so transformative and optimistic. As the first and foundational movie of hip-hop, Wild Style’s ebullient enthusiasm characterized the spirit of ingenuity and community that manifested itself in DIY strategies and guerilla creativities bubbling up from the social and economic margins of bias and redlining. This commonalty of experience between Uptown and Downtown, where the rituals of communication via the dance of b-boys, the rhymes of MCs or the lettering of train writers could go all-city before it conquered the world, is the genesis and genius of Ahearn’s movie. It allows the exotic with the wink of an insider’s gaze and the embrace of an unruly humanism.

Wild Style, though released in 1983 was largely filmed in 1981. This exhibition tries to convey the radical energy and rapid evolution of this culture over that brief time while both preserving the fertile ground from which these sensibilities emerged and acknowledging the legacy of these artists through time. Charlie Ahearn was a member of Colab (or Collaborative Projects) a collective of urban artists that engaged and addressed the inequities and hypocrisies of the city around them, most famously with the Times Square Show of 1980 in a derelict Times Square massage parlor. Their ideas, infusing Downtown like a zeitgeist, are part of the filmmaker’s vision and tradition coming out of the lineage of experimental, underground and No Wave film in New York City, as well as essential to the free-thinking adventurous mindset that made Downtown so receptive and welcoming to these new hybrid expressions emerging Uptown. While Wild Style 40 is in many ways a celebration of the graffiti art form that emerged out of this time and starred in the movie, it is centered within a broader circle of participation, including key figures from Colab, who were also forging new kinds of urban art, artists who were major supporters and benefactors of graffiti, the photographers who not only captured this movement but embodied it, and a few who have somehow carried these traditions with an authenticity and ingenuity that goes beyond what hip-hop sounds like or graffiti looks like today.

There are a lot of famous artists in this room, so there are many ways of trying to explain how and why they were put together. All of that is very important, but for me what really matters is that they are all friends, brought together again to mark a momentous occasion. They are:

Charlie Ahearn, John Ahearn, Janette Beckman, Fred Brathwaite (Fab 5 Freddy), Cathleen Campbell, Henry Chalfant, Joe Conzo, Martha Cooper, Jane Dickson, Brian Donnelly (KAWS), Chris Ellis (Daze), Sandra Fabara (Lady Pink), Aaron Goodstone (Sharp), Eric Haze, John Matos (Crash), Leonard McGurr (Futura), Osgemeos, Phase 2, Lee Quinones, Rammellzee, Revolt, Don White (Dondi), Andrew Witten (Zephyr) and Martin Wong.

— Carlo McCormick

Read more about featured artist Fred Braithwaite (Fab 5 Freddy) and the scene around Wild Style in Vanity Fair.

Watch Charlie Ahearn, Lee Quiñones, Lady Pink and Fab 5 Freddy discuss the making of Wild Style here.

Watch Carlo McCormick, Janette Beckman, Eric Haze, Futura and KAWS discuss style as a form of urban expression through the lense of Wild Style here.

Installation images by Genevieve Hanson.

Jeff Koons and Professor Thomas Crow in conversation to celebrate the release of Luncheons on the Grass: Reimagining Manet’s Le Déjeuner Sur L’Herbe on Thursday, May 9 at 6PM at The Institute of Fine Art. A book singing will take place after the conversation.

Copies of the book will be available at the event. To order your copy before, please visit Rizzoli’s website.

RSVP is required through this link.

Join us Saturday, January 13 for the closing of Wild Style 40, curated by Carlo McCormick, with special guest Grand Master Caz. The event will take place within the exhibition from 6-8PM.

No RSVP or tickets are required.

For more information on the exhibition please visit this link.

Please join us and Roxy Cinemas for a screening of Charlie Ahearn’s seminal film Wild Style on January 4 at 7PM.

Following the movie, director Charlie Ahearn and the film’s leading man, Lee Quiñones will sit down for a Q&A.

Our 18 Wooster Street gallery will be opened before the screening from 5-7PM for a special viewing of our historic exhibition Wild Style 40, curated by Carlo McCormick.

For tickets please visit Roxy Cinema’s website.

To celebrate The Hollywood Reporter‘s annual ‘Oscar Issue’, the publication commissioned eleven leading artists- spanning North America, from L.A. to Guadalajara to New York City- to reinterpret the iconic Oscar statuette in paintings, drawings, sculptures, conceptual photography and performance. Their multimedia works, exclusively displayed in the magazine, will also be the subject of a special Oscar Week exhibition at Jeffrey Deitch in Hollywood, opening March 9.

We asked each artist to give their own version of an Academy Awards speech, with a behind-the-scenes look at what inspired their glittering creations. As Kenny Scharf, the Los Angeles native whose art has defined New York City since the ’80s, succinctly puts it: “I want to thank everyone whoever helped me. Oh, it’s not for me. Byyeeee …”

Participating artist:

Seth Bogart
Polly Borland
Isabelle Brourman
Jose Davila
Karon Davis
Chaz Guest
Trulee Hall
Karl Haendel
Vincent Pocsik
Kenny Scharf
Alake Shilling